1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to partition software configuration of a multi-partition computer system, and more specifically relates to a method and apparatus for utilizing partition resource requirements from workload estimation by a workload estimator to automate partition software configuration and validation.
2. Background Art
Planning and specifying new computer systems or system upgrades is a complicated task faced by computer system administrators. Tools have been developed to simply this process. These tools include workload estimators, system planning tools, and software configuration tools. See for example U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/128,062 filed May 12, 2005, titled “Apparatus and method for automatically defining, deploying and managing hardware and software resources in a logically-partition computer system.”
A workload estimator is a tool used by the system administrator to size a computer server system to carry the specified workload needed by the user. The workload estimator can be used to size a new system, to size an upgrade to an existing system, or to size a consolidation of several systems. Workload Estimator (WLE) developed by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a web-based sizing tool for computer systems manufactured by IBM. The WLE allows measurement input to best reflect the current workload of a user and provide a variety of built-in workloads to reflect emerging application requirements. The WLE provides current and growth recommendations for processor, memory, and disk that satisfy the user specified workloads and performance requirements. The WLE recommends the system model including processor, memory, and DASD requirements that are necessary to handle the overall workload with reasonable performance expectations. A user selects one or more workloads and answers a few questions about each workload. Based on the answers, the WLE generates a system recommendation and shows the predicted CPU utilization of the recommended system.
System planning tools are available to help the system administrator to plan and validate the hardware and partitions of the system. The data from the system planning tool can be used by a deployment wizard that applies the system plan to computer hardware, or it can be used by an order tool to specify hardware from a manufacturer.
In the prior art, the type of workloads for each partition are specified in the workload estimator, but this information is not completely utilized in configuring and validating the partitions of the system by the deployment wizard or by the manufacturer to configure new equipment. The partition by partition resource information does not flow through to the subsequent tools. Without a way to provide a level of automation to install and validate the software components on the partitions that correspond to the workloads the customer specified with the workload estimator, the system administrators will continue to suffer from less efficient ways of hardware deployment and software configuration.